PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A suspected U.S. drone strike killed the No. 2 commander of the Pakistani Taliban on Wednesday, Pakistani intelligence officials said, although the militant group denied he was dead.
If confirmed, the death of Waliur Rehman would be a strong blow to the militant group responsible for hundreds of bombings and shootings across Pakistan. The United States has a $5 million bounty out on Rehman, whom Washington has accused of involvement in the 2009 suicide attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan that killed seven Americans working for the CIA.
Missiles fired by a U.S. drone slammed into a house early Wednesday in Miran Shah, the main town of the North Waziristan tribal region, killing five people including Rehman, Pakistani officials said.
Two officials said their informants in the field saw Rehman’s body, while a third said intelligence authorities had intercepted communications between militants saying Rehman had been killed. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban denied the reports.
“This appears to me to be false news. I don’t have any such information,” said Ahsanullah Ahsan.
The identities of those killed in drone strikes is notoriously difficult to confirm because the remote tribal areas are inaccessible to foreign and most local journalists. Previously Rehman’s boss, Hakimullah Mehsud, was falsely reported to have died in a drone strike in 2010, only to emerge unscathed months later.
White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to confirm whether Rehman was dead. He said if the reports were true, Rehman’s death would deprive the militant group of its chief military strategist involved in “horrific attacks” on a CIA base in Afghanistan and other attacks against Pakistani civilians and soldiers.
The missile attack was the first since Pakistan’s May 11 elections in which the American drone program was a hotly debated topic.
It was also the first strike in Pakistan since President Barack Obama’s May 23 speech during which he discussed more restrictive rules he was implementing on drone use in places such as Pakistan and Yemen.
The tribal region in northwestern Pakistan is home to local and Afghan militant outfits, including al-Qaida-linked fighters. The U.S. often has criticized Pakistan, saying it does not vigorously target militants in these areas who then attack American troops in Afghanistan.
Pakistani officials have said their military is already overtaxed fighting militants in the tribal regions and in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, and that the casualties they’ve already incurred have not been properly recognized.
The Pakistani Taliban, officially called the Tehrik-e-Taliban, has been battling government forces for years in a bid to push them from the tribal regions, cut Pakistan’s ties with the U.S. and eventually establish their brand of hardline Islam across Pakistan.
Rehman has been on the U.S. radar for years. In 2010, Washington offered $5 million for information leading to Rehman under the “Rewards for Justice” program.
While Rehman was mostly known for his activities in Pakistan, the U.S. said in its announcement that he also participated in cross-border attacks in Afghanistan against U.S. and NATO personnel.
The U.S. wanted Rehman in connection with his alleged involvement in an attack on a U.S. base in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009. The attack on Camp Chapman killed seven Americans working for the CIA, a Jordanian intelligence officer and wounded six other CIA personnel.
Pakistan’s incoming prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, has repeatedly said he is against theuse of American drones in Pakistan, and Pakistani officials have demanded publicly that the program be stopped.
Sharif has said he would be open to negotiating with the Pakistani Taliban to end the fighting in the tribal agencies. Rehman’s death could complicate that.
“He was a very cool-minded person, a very intelligent person and he was someone that the government could talk to,” said Mansur Mahsud, director of administration and research at the Islamabad-based FATA Research Center.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the drone strike Wednesday but made no mention of Rehman in its statement.
“The Government of Pakistan has consistently maintained that the drone strikes are counterproductive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives, have human rights and humanitarian implications and violate the principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international law,” the ministry said.
Senior civilian and military officials are known to have supported some of the attacks in the past, but many say that is no longer the case.
Pakistan has been hit by 355 such attacks since 2004, according to the New America Foundation, a U.S.-based think tank. The figure does not include Wednesday’s strike. Up to 3,336 people have died in the strikes, according to the think tank.
Obama’s speech last week was his most extensive comments to date about the secretive drone program, which has come under increased criticism for its lack of accountability.
The president cast drone strikes against Islamic militants as crucial to U.S. counter terrorism efforts but acknowledged that they are not a “cure-all.” The president also said he is deeply troubled by civilians unintentionally killed in the strikes and announced more restrictive rules governing the attacks - measures that his advisers said would effectively limit drone use in the future.
Carney said the new standards did not mean the administration would discuss details of every counter terrorism operation.
It was unclear whether Rehman was considered to have posed a “continuing and imminent threat” to citizens of the United States - one of Obama’s guiding criteria for future drone strikes. But in the days since the president’s speech, U.S. officials have asserted behind the scenes that the new standards would not apply to the CIA drone program in Pakistan as long as U.S. troops remained next door in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani military says that several tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers have died since the Taliban insurgency fully broke out in 2007. In the past year, the Pakistani Taliban began killing polio vaccinators in the northwest - the latest casualty, a female health worker, died Tuesday.
More recently, it sought to influence the recent May 11 election by targeting candidates of secular parties and their supporters, 130 of whom died in the final month of campaigning.
In his early 40s and from a mountainous district of South Waziristan, Rehman had grown in prominence over the past two years as the group’s top leader, Mehsud, was hunted by U.S. drones. In addition to that, the two men developed serious differences over the future direction of the insurgency, creating speculation with militant circles of a serious rift within the group.
While Mehsud adhered to the hard-line Salafist strain of Islam and aligned himself closely with al-Qaida fighters sheltering in Waziristan, Rehman subscribed to the relatively moderate Deobandi school of thought and was linked to the Haqqani Network, which concentrates on attacks across the border in Afghanistan.
Rehman also had ties with several religious parties, some of which had offered to mediate with the Taliban. Mualana Syed Yusuf Shah, the deputy leader of one of those parties, said his death would make it harder to negotiate peace.
“Everything has been overturned,” he said. “Now the Taliban will avenge his killing, resulting in more bloodshed and violence across the country,” Shah said in an interview.
Information for this article was contributed by Asif Shahzad, Rasool Dawar, Rebecca Santana and staff members of The Associated Press and by Declan Walsh and Ismail Khan of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/30/2013